Holy cow is there a ton of stuff going on this weekend. Seriously, I'm a bit saddened that I won't be in town for it all but you are here, right?
First up, Athens Americana 2011. This thing is getting pretty big. We posted the lineup earlier this week. If I might offer a shortlist of people to see: Don Chambers on Saturday, Burning Angels tonight, Borderline Trio on Sunday...Just so many great artists. Do yourself a favor and pop in for a bit.
Athens Twilight! I'll avoid the obvious joke this year but if you've never seen the Twilight Ride, even if you have no interest in bikes, treat yourself this weekend. There's music, tons of drink, and quite a few wince-worthy crashes.
Reptar's highly buzzed about EP comes out this weekend. I haven't been able to get "Houseboat Babies" out of my head for a while and I suppose that goes double for their most rabid fans. Get thee to the funnery!
Music for Mali at New Earth pumps up the volume.
MBUS MayDay Concert features students from the UGA MBUS program along with bands they've worked with. Of course, Director Barbe will be playing as well. Show your support!
So yeah, tons going on. You have NO EXCUSE for staying indoors all weekend. Unless you're playing Portal 2. If you are, I'll go ahead and say, that cake is a lie.
You need to watch the whole thing to get why the AMJ office broke out in squeals and "Oh my gosh that is so cute"s. These kids all rock, hard, but it takes a lot of drive to keep playing in a town where there really isn't anywhere teens can go for solid concerts. I'm a big fan of all-ages shows, despite the problems associated with putting them on.
But back to these guys. It's like a teenage Guns 'N' Roses here. I love that these kids are getting out and playing shows to anyone and everyone. So check this thing out!
Yes, it's that time of year again when guitar pickers and fiddlers and the like come out of the dusty woodwork and settle like oh so many dewdrops on Athens. I have a great fondness for our particular brand of Americana, seeing as how it provided me with my first writing assignments ever.
But you'd be hard pressed to find more talented songwriters in town, regardless of genre. Here there be storytellers and liquor bottles. Starting tomorrow and running through May 1st, Athens Americana hits the most comfortable venues in town. There's lineups for Hendershots, Little Kings, and Flicker, all of which are perfect for sitting back in a comfy chair and letting the performer draw you into folk legends of heartache and happiness.
Here's the lineup, full of pretty well known Athenian acts. Hope to see you there!
Wednesday, April 27th Opening night at Little Kings
Do it for Johnny film screening, 8pm
Thursday, April 28th
Flicker Theatre & Bar:
Ruby Kendrick- 7pm/ Hardy Morris- 8pm/ David Barbe- 9pm
Little Kings (Music begins at 10pm):
Betsy Franck & The Bareknuckle Band- 10pm/ Vespolina- 11pm/ Big C & The Ringers- 12am/ Kaitlin Jones &The County Fair- 1am
Friday, April 29th (Little Kings)
Burning Angels- 8:30pm/ Redneck GReece- 9:20pm/ Justin Evans’ Chinatown Diary- 10:10pm/ The Lanes- 11pm/ Matt Hudgins & His Shit-Hot Country Band- 12am/ Bearfoot Hookers- 1am
Saturday, April 30th (Little Kings)
Acoustic Happy Hour w/ artisan market: Patrick Carey & Jeremy Wheatley- 4pm/ Bareknuckle Betties- 5pm/ High Strung String Band- 6pm
Night show:
Yo Soybean- 7:30pm/ Dare Dukes- 8:15pm/ Corduroy Road- 9pm/ Adam Klein & friends- 9:45pm/ The Buzzards- 10:30pm/ Dave Marr- 11:15pm/ Dodd Ferrelle- 12am/ Don Chambers & GOAT- 12:45am
Sunday, May 1st Closing Party at Hendershot’s
Welfare Liners- 3pm/ Borderhop Trio- 4pm/ Curley Maple- 5pm/ Little Country Giants- 6pm/ Hope For Agoldensummer- 7pm
And this one is no where near as commotion stirring as those other ones, I tell you. That said, I like this one the best. It's just Lera doing what she does best. How do you like it?
Okay guys, here we go with another few short bursts about what's happening here in Athens!
Widespread Panic's equipment manager Garrie Vereen's death was officially ruled a suicide.
Kurt Wood's Front Porch Record Store is this weekend.
Michael Stipe is headed to the White House. (via Blake)
ARNOLD BEAN REUNION!
UGA's tuition goes up 3%. Sure, it doesn't sound too bad but add in cuts to HOPE and nearly $900 in fees... well, it ain't pretty. Not to mention Adams has another 8% to cut from the budget. Breakdowns are here.
The documentary Athens Burning will be showing at Cine all this week. The movie, which I suppose will be in constant progress until its subject the Georgia Theatre is back on its feet, features a ton of interviews from local musicians and footage from the fire itself.
Bloodkin will play after the first showing this Friday and there will be a Q & A session with the filmmakers. Oh, and light refreshments too. Admission is $10, the film runs through the 28th, and any more info you need about it all can be found on Cine's site.
STS9 or (Sound Tribe Sector 9) is hitting Athens this week if you haven't heard (or don't hang much on jam band sites...). Yeah, they were an Atlanta band until relocating to California but with as much touring as they've done in the area, they still have some pretty significant ties here in town. Not to mention it's good to hear that Murph is going on the road again. Screw you, cancer!
So there's a pretty awesome STS9 pre-party going on Wednesday night at Terrapin to benefit Rock Against Cancer. Interesting stuff to note about the party: a raffle for STS9 tickets, art prints, autographed goodies; commemorative Terrapin glasses (they look awesome!); live music; Terrapin drinks; and tons more. Find all the other info here!
Seriously, some bad weather is headed our way. So, allow us to pimp our friend Matt's Athens Ga Weather Blog. He's pretty darn good at telling you what to expect weather wise.I'd also recommend his twitter feed for up to the minute stuff.
As yesterday's calendar post probably indicated, Athens has a ton of events going on this Saturday in celebration of Record Store Day. I'd say we're pretty lucky to have 3 independent record stores in town instead of the usual, um, none. Between Wuxtry, Schoolkids, and the new (sorta) kid Low Yo Yo Stuff, you have plenty of opportunities to snag whatever rare vinyl you've had your eye on.
A lot of awesome bands have put up stuff for the day. R.E.M. has three singles going, I'm seeing a Green Day/Husker Du listing, colored vinyl galore... Scuse me while I drool. The full list is here.
Plus we've got in store shows happening all day. Wuxtry will feature some of their compilation bands while Yo Yo's lineup can be found here. What I find amazing is that Michael Guthrie is performing THREE times in ONE day. Man o' Steel. So do yourself a favor and get out there this weekend. And vinyl hounds? Word is that Kurt Wood's Front Porch vinyl sale is coming up. Your bank account will cry but oh the sweet sounds your record player will make...
Last time I talked a little about Peter Buck and some elementary aspects of his style and tone. One of my goals for these columns was to bring some attention to Athens' current and lesser-known—at least compared to Buck—musicians and the styles in which they play, but I also thought it was important to begin from the beginning, so to speak, with the players that made Athens' music scene what it is today. And so this second column is devoted to another historically significant Athens guitarist, the late Randy Bewley of Pylon.
Pylon's overall sound might be simply (and perhaps lazily) described as angular. The angular sound comes from late-'70s British post-punk (Gang of Four, Wire) and its mid-2000s revival (Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys) and consists of mostly minor-key—think “dark” sounding—chord progressions and harsh, separated, and distinct—staccato, in musical parlance—guitar notes.
Now if you know anything at all about the origins of Pylon, you probably know that the band's members were UGA art students who had little to no formal musical training prior to their forming. (Drummer Curtis Crowe was the exception.) Well, Bewley was so inexperienced that for a time he was unaware that he was playing with his guitar tuned incorrectly. The band's bassist Michael Lachowski described the process: “Randy thought he had tuned the strings correctly and by the time that he found out it wasn't the proper tuning for a guitar, he was too accustomed to his tuning and/or realized that it was part of his sound.”
Traditionally, a guitar is tuned, from the lowest-tone string to the highest: E, A, D, G, B, E; Bewley's was tuned: A, D, G, C, E, E. There have been a few guitarists that purposely arranged their guitar's tuning so that strummed chords and finger-picked arpeggios can be played mostly with open strings—Dashboard Confessional's Chris Carrabba and Iron & Wine's Sam Beam are examples—but it's a relatively recent practice. And Bewley's minimalist style, in which he disproportionately played single note licks, and rarely if ever played full six-note chord arrangements, wouldn't have been helped with that style of alternate tuning.
The main purpose of the traditional tuning arrangement is that it allows a guitarist to play two full octaves worth of notes without having to move his hand to the left or right. The interval from one string to the next is either four or five frets, and the interval from one fret to the next is a half-step, a half-step being the smallest interval between differentiated notes, including flats and sharps. (All the keys on a piano, whether ebony or ivory, are a half-step apart.) So a guitarist can play up to five frets on a single string before needing to shift to the next string, and can just perfectly cover those five frets with four fingers. Changing the tuning even slightly means there's going to be either gaps or overlaps in notes as they cross strings. Those gaps and overlaps are going to create awkward and often interesting licks and riffs; your ear's going to hear one note and your brain will think it knows what's coming next, and it's going to be wrong. There's no better example of this than the first 40 seconds of “Precaution” from Gyrate.
Another crucial aspect of Bewley's playing is the interplay he had with Lachowski. In the band's early days, before they had a drummer or singer, the two engaged in long jam sessions, where one played a repeating groove for several minutes while the other experimented with accompanying riffs. That practice certainly contributed to the stark independence between guitar and bass parts in their songs. (So often, bassists, even experienced ones, just double the guitarist's parts in a lower register.) The two often played counterpoint, one going up the scale and the other down, or vice versa, as if they were the left and right hand in a Bach invention. “Volume”, also from Gyrate, best encapsulates that interplay.
There probably wouldn’t be an Athens scene, at least not one like we’re accustomed to today, without R.E.M. and Pylon. The many great musicians in our town that have benefited from the attention Buck, Bewley, and their band-mates have brought over the last three decades or so are the guys I'll be focusing on starting with my next column. As always, if you have any questions or feedback, or recommendations for future Don't Fret subjects, you can leave a comment here or on AMJ's Facebook page, or e-mail me at amjintern@gmail.com.
Here's another one of those bands that stays on the outer edges of my radar for a long time, only to come swarming back in every few months or so. Tealvox shares some lineage with Radiolucent. But the Tealvox of today isn't the same one you might remember from a while back. The gang has honed their alt-pop rock to include some great rhythms and stronger vocal performances.
I highly recommend listening to "Neon Lights." There's a ferocity here paired with some dance worthy bass work that just takes my breath away. And the guys put on a pretty darn good live show too. It's worth your time to take a quick listen, trust me.
Yup. Guadalcanal Diary is back. And so are the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies. Futurebirds, Centro-Matic, and Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit round out this year's lineup for the Athfest 2011 Headliners. These shows will be on the big stages outside and are absolutely free to anyone who happens by.
National Record Store Day is coming up fast (April 16th). So in addition to all the awesome limited records you can get at Wuxtry, Lo Yo Yo, and Schoolkids, MAX (formally Max Canada), is throwing a concert party type thing. Swing by starting at 7 for Already Taken, Mr. Falcon,The HEAP, and Lefty Hathaway Band. Yay vinyl!
It was announced that the Georgia Music Hall of Fame is staying in Macon. No surprise there. As much as I'd love to see it in Athens, I have to wonder if it wouldn't be better off in ATL near the other touristy things...
This weekend is Seize the Airwaves at WUOG. It's simple. A $10 donation will go to a local charity and you get an hour to play whatever you want on air. I speak from experience when I say djaying on the radio is awesome. AWESOME.
You should be watching this re-stream of a bunch of our guys at SXSW playing for Japan.
The Day Jobs have posted some stuff about the Drive By Truckers.
The GA Theatre is right on track to open later this year. Word is we'll get a few soft opening gigs followed by a bunch of massive acts. Hopefully one by the last big Athens band who hasn't played Athens this year. *ahem*
Oh, and HAPPY 31st BIRTHDAY R.E.M. Major shout outs to K.O. and the Side Effects as well. Hard to believe this time last year I was djaying 5 hours of R.E.M. goodness on WUOG. How the days fly... Collapse into now indeed.
Hey you! Got some free time tomorrow between 4:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.? If you do, break out your dark clothes and the facepaint. It's ZOMBIE TIME! Supercluster needs some walking un (re?) dead for their new music video.
Word is that the song will be "Neat in the Street," originally written by The Side Effects. Supercluster's take is no less amazing than the original. So get out there and zombie it up. Who knows? Do a good enough job and maybe through some weird series of events you'll end up on that "Walking Dead" show...
From the band:
We are in the process of filming a new Supercluster music video. Any one wishing to participate is welcome. Please dress in your zombie best. Dark clothes Preferred. you are welcome to do your own makeup, I will also try to bring some extra makeup. there will be fake blood. Hope to see you there. Also it would be good to have a few guys not in zombie make up at the beginning of the shoot so they can be filmed being chased/running from the zombies. we will all be meeting outside at the tracy street warehouse and then possibly walking around to various spots in that neighborhood.
Not everyone involved in Athens music is a musician. There are your producers, booking agents, hack music journalists (heh), and so on. But special among these are those wielding the camera. These photographers are the ones who capture forever the greatness of one musical moment.
It's not an easy job. Photographers are stuck dealing with people trying to get your services for free, horrible lighting conditions, and demanding clients. Music photographers can look forward to abuse in the form of getting crushed by the front row at shows, denied access to the press pit, be allowed only one song to shoot, or even worse, forced to leave a show entirely after traveling a long way for it.
We're extremely lucky to have a great group of music photographers here in Athens. Tonight, three of our best are having a party to open their photography exhibit at Dog Ear Books. Chris McKay, Daniel Peiken, and Mike White are all long time favorites of AMJ. You've probably seen their work on here somewhere. Chris has done a lot of mainstream shooting but many of his shots are locally based, like the return of R.E.M. to the 40 Watt. Mike can be seen at pretty much any hard rockin show around. His photos have been used as album covers even! And Daniel is a fixture here in town, taking shots of anyone and everything to provide a unique scope to our scene.
So I really really hope you'll join us tonight and through the month to look at (and possibly buy) some of these wonderful shots. Viva la resolution.
When: Reception from 7-10 p.m. Friday
Where: Dog Ear Books, 162 W. Clayton St.
Cost: Free
